In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Activists in Florida found a way to torture the state’s education spending data to make appear as though Florida is 50th in education spending. The only catch is that their rather unconventional method ranks Washington D.C. as 51st, despite the fact that D.C. spends nearly $30,000 per pupil, putting it in first place for spending per pupil according to the U.S. Census Bureau (page 11, table 11).

How did they accomplish this literally unbelievable statistical feat? As Patrick Gibbons explains at RedefinED, the activists have inappropriately seized on the U.S. Census Bureau’s “education revenues per $1,000 of personal income” figure. Holding all else constant, Florida could improve its ranking using that figure either by spending more on education or by its citizens becoming poorer. Gibbons crunched the numbers to see what it would take to put Florida in 24th place, just above the median, without increasing spending:

To reach the “above average” point on the spending-per-income statistic, Florida would need education revenues of $49.15 per $1,000 of personal income. Without spending a dime more, or less, on education, Florida could boost its ranking to 24th in the nation if its collective income simply shrank by 26 percent.

Florida would become THE POOREST state in the U.S., but we would have above-average education spending – at least according to this misleading metric. Something tells me nobody will be happy with those results.

Embedded in the activists’ use of this figure is the odd notion that it costs more to educate students from wealthier states than students from poorer states. Indeed, if every state had exactly the same “education revenues per $1,000 of personal income” then rich states would far outspend poor states, yet I suspect that the activists citing this figure would not be pleased.

When the 1940 census was collected, the public was reassured that the information it gathered would be kept private. “No one has access to your census record except you,” the public was told. President Franklin Roosevelt said: “There need be no fear that any disclosure will be made regarding any individual or his affairs.”

Apparently the limits of what the government can do with census information have their limits. Today the 1940 census goes online.

When the Census Bureau transferred the data to the National Archives, it agreed to release of the data 72 years after its collection. So much for those privacy promises.

Eighty-seven percent of Americans can find a direct family link to one or more of the 132+ million people listed on those rolls. The 1940 census included 65 questions, with an additional 16 questions asked of a random 5 percent sample of people. You can find out what your father did, how much he made, or if he was on the dole. You may be able to find out if your mother had an illegitimate child before she married your father.

To be sure, this data will open a fascinating trove for researchers into life 70 years ago. But the Federal Trade Commission would not recognize a “fascinating trove” exception if a private company were to release data it had collected under promises of confidentiality.

Government officials endlessly point the finger at the private sector for being a privacy scourge. Senator Al Franken did last week in a speech to the American Bar Association last week (text; Fisking). He’s the chairman of a Senate subcommittee dedicated to examining the defects in private sector information practices. Meanwhile, the federal government is building a massive data and analysis center to warehouse information hoovered from our private communications, and the Obama Administration recently extended to five years the amount of time it can retain private information about Americans under no suspicion of ties to terrorism.

Marcus has the bare minimum lesson to take from this episode: “Remember this in 2020.”

After years of reforms that have reduced the government’s once-pervasive involvement in most people’s lives, some Chinese are proving reluctant to give up personal information and harboring suspicions about what the government plans to do with their details.

Everyone in America, I presume, has just received a letter from the U.S. Census Bureau urging us to fill out our Census forms. Seems like a very expensive way to tell us to watch for the form to arrive in the mail. But I’m particularly interested in why they say we should promptly fill out the form:

Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of [federal] government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.

Obviously this is a zero-sum game. If my neighbors and I all fill out the form, then you and your neighbors will get less from the common federal trough. But at least we’ll be getting our “fair share,” as the letter tells us twice in three sentences.

But where does the government get the authority to ask me my race, my age, and whether I have a mortgage? In fact, the Constitution authorizes the federal government to make an “actual enumeration” of the people in order to apportion seats in the House of Representatives. That’s all. Not to define and count us by race. Not to ask whether we’re homeowners or renters. Just to ask how many people live here, so they can apportion congressional seats.

I’m not interested in getting taxpayers around the country to pay for roads and schools and “many other programs” in my community. All the government needs to know from me is how many people live in my house. And I will tell them.

The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department recently sent out a letter to the chairs of the Asian Pacific, black, and Hispanic caucuses in Congress, reassuring them that the Patriot Act’s expansion of information-gathering powers, including the controversial Section 215, does not override federal statutes guaranteeing the confidentiality of census data. DOJ’s view, according to Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, is that “if Congress intended to override these protections, it would say so clearly and explicitly.”

Section 215, recall, is colloquially referred to as the “business records” provision of Patriot, though in fact it permits investigators to obtain “any tangible thing” from a designated person or entity by obtaining an order from the secret FISA court, subject only to a showing that the records sought are “relevant” to a national security investigation. As Weich observes, §215 does not contain the “notwithstanding any other law” language present in other parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which means that it cannot be presumed on face to override other federal privacy statues establishing a higher degree of protection for specific categories of sensitive records.

What’s interesting to me, however, is that a similar issue arose several years ago, not with respect to the census confidentiality statute, but rather the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (aka FERPA, aka the Buckley Amendment). Initially, DOJ attorneys similarly opted not to seek education records under §215 on the grounds that the FISA court might conclude FERPA trumped Patriot in the absence of language giving §215 explicit priority, as the Office of the Inspector General’s initial report on the use of §215 explains. Nevertheless, the Counsel for Intelligence Policy told OIG that his office “would have been willing to present an application to the FISA court for educational records if the FBI considered the information important enough and wanted to press the issue with the FISA Court.”

Subsequent amendments to the statute alleviated those concerns:

According to [National Secrity Law Branch] and [Office of Intelligence Policy and Review] attorneys, this legal impediment to obtaining educational records has been addressed. Section 106(a)(2) of the Reauthorization Act amended FISA by ading 50 U.S.C. §1861(a)(3), which specifically addresses educational, medical, tax and other sensitive categories of business records. The amendment provided that when the FBI is requesting such items, the request must be personally approved by the FBI Director, the FBI Deputy Director, or the Executive Assistant Director for National Security. According to several NSLB and OPPR attorneys we interviewed, because this provision clarifies that educational records are obtainable through the use of a Section 215 order, the non-disclosure provisions of Section 215 apply rather than the notification provisions of the Buckley Amendment.

Census records, of course, are not mentioned, and the statutory language protecting those records from legal process is unusually strong and unqualified. On the other hand, neither does the amended language explicitly override the federal statutes protecting the specified categories of records. Rather, it adds a layer of oversight for several types of requests that are implied to fall within the scope of §215. Indeed, at the time, this portion of the Reauthorization Act was publicly portrayed as increasing protections for sensitive records.

That, at any rate, was the spin the Congressional Research Service gave it. Based on OIG’s account, it sounds as though a reform that had been painted as a concession to civil libertarians actually allowed the acquisition of those sensitive records for the first time, since they’d previously been regarded as off-limits by statute. So I suppose we should be glad they didn’t decide to simultaneously “enhance” the safeguards on census records.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily impossible for those records to ever be obtained via a §215 order. As Weich’s letter clearly says, the Census Act prohibits “the Commerce Secretary and other covered individuals from disclosing protected census information.” But as the Supreme Court clarified in St. Regis Paper v. United States, that confidentiality requirement is only binding on specific covered individuals. If the government is able to get its hands on a copy of a census record by serving some non-covered individual, the record itself is not off limits.

Since I know approximately nothing about the fine points of record handling protocol within the Census Bureau, I can’t really say how much of a practical difference that makes. Still, given that we’ve seen statutory records protections effectively stripped away under the guise of enhancing those protections, I think it’s reasonable to infer that census records will be considered fair game under §215 if they can be obtained from a source other than the designated officials.

Most activities undertaken by the federal government have no constitutional basis. One exception is the Census carried out every 10 years to determine the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives. Alas, it appears that even this core federal function is subject to cost overruns and waste, as a new report from the Department of Commerce’s inspector general illustrates.

Quarterly updates of progress on the census by the inspector general were required by legislation in 2008, which gave the Census Bureau an additional $210 million “to help cover spiraling 2010 decennial costs stemming from the bureau’s problematic efforts to automate major field operations, major flaws in its cost-estimating methods, and other issues.”

So how are things going?

The Census has been forced to rush the creation of a paper-based processing system for its field staff because its original plan to equip workers with hand-held computers was a boondoggle. In the world of government, “rush” means that Census told Congress in April 2008 that it was scrapping the computers.

In 2006, the Census Bureau awarded a $595 million contract to Harris Corp. to develop more than 525,000 handheld computers that enumerators would use to collect data from Americans who did not send in their census forms… Since awarding the contract, the project has experienced constant setbacks, including changing system requirements that led to increased costs and missed deadlines. Reports by the Government Accountability Office, the department’s inspector general and Mitre Corp. all issued warnings that the handhelds were at risk of not being ready by 2010 and may not work as planned.

According to the inspector general’s report, the paper-based replacement system is also having problems:

“We found that system development and testing have fallen substantially behind schedule, resulting in less functionality and an increased likelihood of field staff’s encountering technical problems during operations.”

“Although development staff have been deployed as much as possible — working two shifts per day, extended hours, weekends and holidays — the schedule to build new functionality has not appreciably improved, and testing of already developed functionality continues to fall farther behind.”

Defects in the software have gone from 26 to 80 in the past year. As a result of the software delays and defects, the development of the training materials is 31 days behind schedule.

As for actual system performance, “Two load tests were conducted in December 2009 to determine the network and computing capacity needed during peak operations. The first test revealed numerous performance and functional problems. Although many of these problems were alleviated for the second test, performance issues persist.” Deployment is less than five weeks away.

The estimated cost of the census has increased by $3.2 billion in the last two years and is now expected to cost $14.7 billion. The inspector general’s take on cost overruns at early local census offices (ELCOs) speaks for itself:

These wide variances between budgeted and actual costs do not generate confidence in the Census Bureau’s budgeting and cost containment processes for large-scale field operations.

“For the quality control phase of the operation, ELCOs’ wage costs were 68–439 percent of their budgets and for mileage were less than one percent to 878 percent of their budgets.”

That’s some quality control.

As for government efficiency:

During Address Canvassing, 15,263 employees received training but worked for less than a single day or did not work at all. Of these employees, 10,235 did not work at all but earned approximately $3.4 million for attending training. An additional 5,028 employees completed training, at a cost of $2.2 million in wages, but worked for less than a single day.

Looking at how the federal government is bungling a core constitutional function, it’s amazing that we let it meddle in housing, energy, health care, and thousands of other activities the Founders didn’t envision it doing.

The Washington Post profiles Daniel Weinberg, assistant director of the Census, who says:

“Since the decennial census is in our Constitution, it is the most important task a government statistician can undertake. The census is key to our democratic society by making sure that our congressional districts are equal in size so that we have representative democracy. To be involved in something that is central to our democracy is pretty exciting.”

Good point. The census is indeed in the Constitution, Article I, Section 2. The Constitution provides that every ten years an enumeration of the population of each state shall be made in order to allocate members of the House of Representatives.

Unfortunately, the census has been loaded down with intrusive questions not authorized in the Constitution and bearing no relation to the constitutional necessity of reapportionment. This year the Census Bureau is boasting of “one of the shortest forms in history,” which is all to the good. Still, it does ask respondents to list their race, which really should be irrelevant to government. And to tell whether they own their home or have a mortgage, in order “to administer housing programs and to inform planning decisions.” (That’s worked out well!) And of course they need age and sex data, in order to facilitate various government programs and mandates and to assist “sociologists, economists, and other researchers who analyze social and economic trends.”

Through the American Community Survey, the Census Bureau continues to ask Americans many more questions, from whether you’re on food stamps to how many bathrooms you have. All very interesting to sociologists and planners, of course, but hardly what Madison anticipated when he and his colleagues provided for an “actual enumeration” of the constituents of Congress.

Writing in Slate back in 2000, Tom Palmer complained that the Census Bureau was selling the census as a kind of Super Lotto: You can’t win if you don’t play! “The numbers are used to help determine the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal and state funds. We’re talking hospitals, highways, stadiums and school lunch programs.” Come on! Get your piece of other people’s tax dollars!